'Black Swan' falls short of greatness

Published 12:00 am, Friday, December 17, 2010

Natalie Portman plays a ballerina striving for the top in ?Black Swan.? The film was nominated for a Golden Globe for best picture. (Niko Tavernise / Fox Searchlight)

Natalie Portman plays a ballerina striving for the top in ?Black Swan.? The film was nominated for a Golden Globe for best picture. (Niko Tavernise / Fox Searchlight)

Photo: Niko Tavernise

'Black Swan' falls short of greatness

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There's something demented about "Black Swan," and not in a good way. It's excessive and psychologically imprecise, coarse where it should be refined and too much like a David Cronenberg horror movie in places where restraint and intellectual rigor are called for. Yet, this story of an up-and-coming ballerina facing a psychological crisis is the movie out there most worth talking about -- and so, in a way, it's the most worth seeing.

For all its hamfistedness, it captures something about the tyranny of the ballet world and, by extension, the neurotic imprisonment of female body image. The asceticism and beauty of ballet and the subjugation, ritual and devotion that a ballerina's life requires have no other modern equivalent.

Jane Campion, with her cold meticulousness and woman's insight, could have made this material a masterpiece. But Darren Aronofsky, a more full-bodied but less psychologically astute director, made it. He concentrates on the physical details -- the cracked toenails, the dislocated ribs, the blood -- in ways that call to mind his previous film, "The Wrestler." What he doesn't understand, he brazens through.

At the center of the tempest is Natalie Portman as a ballerina who has devoted her life to her dream. She is up for the role of the Swan Queen in a new production of "Swan Lake," but the ballet master (Vincent Cassel), though certain of her incarnation as the virtuous White Swan half of the dual role, doubts she has the sexual allure and spontaneity to play the White Swan's evil twin.

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Nina (Portman) is contrasted with Mila Kunis, who has Black Swan written all over her. Her ease in her body is a rebuke to Nina's self-punishment.Kunis epitomizes the freedom, sexuality and confidence of an undamaged self.

But then anyone would be damaged with a mother like Nina's, who waits, every night, for Nina to come through the door and then pounces on her with questions and smothering solicitation. The toxic interaction between Portman and Barbara Hershey as mother and daughter is the most charged and subtle element in the film.

The film's central question is whether Nina can break with Mom decisively enough to find the Black Swan within. The showbiz trope -- will she hold it together for opening night? -- has rarely if ever been conveyed in such extreme terms. She will end up the toast of the town or in a straitjacket.

The line between realized artistry and mental disorder can be blurry, and this is where the filmmakers, particularly Aronofsky, lose control. The more flamboyant the movie gets, the less dramatic, and the movie's lack of clarity in its fundamental psychological terms becomes a letdown.

If Portman's performance falls short of greatness, it's the fault of the movie, for being more about style than revelation. Still, her emotional repression and physical rigor are impressive, and she goes deep into every area Aronofsky offers her, doing absolutely everything she can do with what's there. Oscars have been won for less.